Fat figures

I am sure his letter was somewhat tongue in cheek, but may I correct Ken Brown's conclusion that fatties are "green" (12 February, p 27). He states that 20 per cent of the world's population is overweight, and reducing this would release 10 billion tonnes of CO2.

Let's assume the worst case: that these 1.2 billion people are so overweight that they carry, on average, an extra 64 kilograms of carbon - which would means they were so obese as to be immobile, since the fat and associated water would weigh far more than that.

This would be converted into about 234 kilograms of CO2 (taking round-number atomic weights for carbon and oxygen of 12 and 16 respectively), making less than 300 million tonnes of CO2.

As most extremely obese people live in the developed countries, they will use more fossil fuels to travel around, and use more resources for ...

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